Improving Jury Duty

Last week I mentioned part one of a column by Findlaw's Vikram Amar about the problems with the modern American jury. In today's column, Amar moves onto to suggestions for bettering the jury system. The goal of his reforms, it seems to me, is to drastically cut the amount of voir dire to produce a jury that is more truly representative of the community, rather than merely the product of legal wrangling.

To an extent, I agree with that ideal. That more educated people are seen as poison on a jury is a serious problem, for instance. However I disagree with one of Amar's specific suggestions - doing away with peremptory challenges. Those are challenges where one party may excuse a potential juror without giving a reason. It allows the parties to weed out jurors that may be biased against them if they can't convince the judge of that fact. Most jurisdictions limit the number of peremptory challenges to a handful. In a perfect world, where judges made correct decisions all the time and juror bias wasn't a concern, they wouldn't be needed. Unfortunately, we don't live in, much less practice law in, that world.